Here’s a video I made from an article I wrote, which you can find at Ezine Articles:
I did a call the other night about blogging, and one of the questions I was asked was, “How can I tell if someone else has already used the material I bought from an outsourcer?” I didn’t have a good web software or other source for that, and it bothered me. I’m known for having the answers, and when I’m asked a question I can’t answer fuly, well… I can’t rest until I find an answer and provide it.
What I’ve done to track down dupe content in the past is just to grab a unique phrase from whatever it is, and Google it. You’d be surprised at how Google can catch stuff like that. But, it’ s certainly not a foolproof solution.
Today, I found a site called “CopyScape,” and it’s not a hidden resource. In fact, Google partners with them to find dupe content on the Web. You can run a free search there for any web page, or you can pay $0.05 per search for content pieces. That means, you can do lots of searches very inexpensively. You can also monitor your content for folks, who might be pulling it right from your site. That’s pretty sweet, if you worry about that sort of thing.
It’s happened to me. Someone decided to rip off my blog verbatim, and put it on his own blog without proper attribution. Grr. As a professional writer, that really pisses me off!
But I’m lucky with outsource content. I have two really great outsource people that I trust.
But if I were buying a lot of articles from Elance.com, or one of the other outsource sites, from people that I didn’t know, you can betcha I’d be using CopyScape to check every piece before I paid good money for recycled articles. You should, too.
Well, there are no free passes are there? I mean, yesterday (or at least I first heard of it yesterday), the major search engines came up with this cool link tag, called a “canonical tag,” which tells the spiders not to worry about duplicate content and points them to the proper page, or the canonical, where the original content sits, right?
I thought, Wow! That will solve a lot of problems. You just add this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />
to the <head> section of your page and it tells the search engine what the preferred URL is. Here’s what Google said:
“Now, you can simply add this
tag to specify your preferred version:inside the section of the duplicate content URLs:
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678
and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.”
(Read the full article at: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html)
So before I got too excited about the possibility, I found that this tag only applies in connection with dupe content on the same website. Oh, sure. They couldn’t possibly make it easy for us original content providers, now could they?
I mean, think about how that works. You write an article and put it into a directory. Lots of folks post it to their sites, newsletters, what have you. Does your original article get the credit? Maybe, maybe not. I’d love for there to be a way that I could tag my content as original, wouldn’t you? But I have no clue how they could make it happen. Anyone could tag a piece of content, original or not. Still, would be nice to be able to brand your work, eh?
So, this canonical tag is good for what it does, but it only applies to dupe content within a single website. If you’re an e-commerce site, it’s quite probable that you have duplicate content on your site, so this new tag will be a good thing for you. All of the search engines are supposed to recognize it.
For the rest of us… There may be applications, but it’s not as cool as I had hoped. Oh, I dared to dream, anyway.
I was over at Blogosphere News today and see that we’re getting yet another upgrade to WordPress–version 2.6, which is due out in August. The changes are interesting, but not sure how awesome. They’re integrating with Google Gears and making it harder to lose posts if your browser crashes and such. I mean, those things are interesting, but… it may be a developer dream. Since I’m not one of those, I’ll withhold judgment until I see the results.
You can check out the post at BlogHerald.com
I also watched a video today that was pretty interesting from Michael Gray of GrayWolf’s SEO Blog
He says that it’s best to make your blog super simple for the GoogleBot. Well, we knew that, but here’s something I never thought of. (And Duh… shame on me.) Michael says that when you’re choosing a category for your post, it’s best to keep it in ONE category, not two or three or the “very bright for a 5-year-old” GoogleBot may think that you have dupe content on your blog.
Well…
We all know that’s bad.
I’m going back and changing the posts that I just had to add categories to for my readers’ sake.
But, then, who needs readers? 
I mean, I want to be a good SEO person and do all the right SEO stuff and make the Google ghods love me, but hey…
The audience is really what matters, eh?
From here on, I may try to keep my categories singular.
And then again, maybe not.
Duplicate content has been the bane of search engines for quite some time. Why? Because search engines simply don’t want to return 10 results and have it all be the same article, video, etc. Spiders love fresh meat, and if they think yours is slightly overdone, you will have issues.
Don’t get me wrong…
You won’t pay a penalty in most cases, unless the dupe content is on your own site. Then, the heavy hands of the Google ghod will pound you into SERP (search engine results page) oblivion.
I have concrete proof of this.
I have a client with a big membership site. It’s in constant need of content, and I was providing it for the blog. The person in charge of the site decided that he could use the same content on the front page, and WHAM! The site dropped from #3 to #602 the moment the spiders found it.
Here’s the proof that dupe content was the problem: When I removed the duplicate items, we shot right back to #3 within a day or two.
However, most often marketers use dupe content in article directories, or they use the same content on their blogs as is on their website. Though this won’t raise a penalty, it won’t help you, either. Only ONE site will get credit for that content (at least at Google) and it may not be yours, even though you originated it.
Fresh content is best.
If you can’t write two articles, write one and then, rewrite it completely, making it fresh and new again. It’s a lot of work, but hey… If you’re in this to win, you don’t want to waste time sending out content that won’t win you any laurel leaves, either, right? Take the time to create quality content, put it out there, and watch to see what happens. You’ll should be happily surprised.
